If Murdoch wins the Journal, he'll call the tune

For many American journalists it would appear that he is the devil incarnate and he has no right therefore to buy a hallowed newspaper such as the Journal.

No matter that the paper has been poorly managed for years. No matter that it has pursued a poor online strategy, ceding ground to rival media businesses. No matter, even, that its comment pages are renowned as the most reactionary in American journalism.

What exercises Murdoch's critics is that he might interfere in the Journal's editorial coverage and thereby undermine its editorial independence. In the States it is considered a heinous crime for an owner to exert influence over content and much the same is routinely said about British newspaper owners, too. I have said it myself often down the years. But I have changed my mind.

Indeed, I have changed it so much that I now find myself arguing in public what most owners only ever say in private: if they pay the money for the train set then they should have the right to operate the signals.

With some rare exceptions (such as The Guardian and The Observer), newspapers are private businesses, acquired on the open market. It's all very well opposing the market but, at this stage in history, that's like imitating King Canute.

Once we concede the hegemony of the market then we have to accept that proprietorship grants rights, most obviously over the product.

Newspapers are no different from any other businesses in that respect. They may proclaim a public-service ethic, and also do their best to live up to it, but that doesn't alter the fact that they are commercial operations, whether in private hands or by publicly quoted companies.

The idea that there is a wall between the commercial side and the editorial side is nonsense. That has been obvious to journalists in Britain for a long time, but their Stateside colleagues are just catching up.

American journalists are in denial. Most cannot bring themselves to admit the new reality while others, though recognising it, are lashing out wildly at its effects.

That is the underlying reason for the scorn directed at Murdoch.What journalists there have to grasp, as do many over here, is that there are only four reasons for newspaper ownership: profit, propaganda, prestige and public service.

Corporate owners are only interested in the first. Private owners or entrepreneurs who command their public companies in Murdoch's fashion tend to favour a mixture of the first and second while, of course, proclaiming the fourth and enjoying the status of the third.

Murdoch is no different from other owners but, like them, he knows he must maintain the fiction that he does not influence the content of his papers. He would never say as openly as the late owner of the Express titles, Lord Beaverbrook, did in the Forties, that he owned his papers to make propaganda. So he denies reality too, conscious that he must say in public that his editors are independent and solely responsible for all that goes into their newspapers.

Admittedly, Murdoch has been more open about involving himself in the content of his tabloids, such as The Sun and the New York Post.

But there was a moment last week when he came close to saying what he really thinks about the situation.

He allowed a Time magazine reporter to sit in while he was talking on the phone about his irritation with the Bancroft family, who own the majority of the Dow Jones shares and who are trying to insure, after selling out to Murdoch for a healthy profit from his £2.5 billion offer, that he "respects" the Journal's independence.

Murdoch said: "They're taking five billion dollars out of me and want to keep control in an industry in crisis. They can't sell their company and still control it that's not how it works." Of course that's not how it works.

Owners have views, and what is the point of owning papers if they don't use them to air them?